First benchmarks of Intel’s Broadwell-E Core i7-6950X appear

Posted 06 May 2016 - 02:27 AM

Night Hunter

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It’s tough to get overly excited about Kaby Lake, a stopgap release intended to fill the void left by Cannonlake’s delay, but don’t forget that Intel still has Broadwell-E on the roadmap. Intel plans on launching Broadwell-E to the enthusiast market later this year, and in the meantime Overclock.net forum user Silicon Lottery posted a handful of benchmarks comparing the Core i7-6950X to a Core i7-5960X, a Haswell-E CPU.

The Core i7-6950X is expected to be Intel’s flagship Broadwell-E processor. It’s built on a 14nm manufacturing process, has 10 cores with Hyper Threading support, and wields 25MB of L3 cache. What Silicon Power benchmarked was an engineering sample, which is a pre-release version that’s typically intended to test compatibility and to give system builders a jumpstart on designing products.

Silicon Lottery ran the Core i7-6950X at the same 3GHz base and 3.5GHz boost clockspeeds as the Core i7-5960X, though it’s not clear if that’s also the default clocks of the Broadwell-E part or if he did that just for the sake of comparison. Either way, the Broadwell-E CPU has a core count advantage and more L3 cache than the 22nm Core i7-5960X, which is an 8-core chip with Hyper Threading and 20MB of L3 cache. Both have a 140W TDP and are compatible with Intel X99 motherboards with LGA 2011-3 sockets.

As for the benchmarks, the Core i7-6950X scored 1,904 (multi-core) and 151 (single-core) in Cinebench, versus the Core i7-5960X scoring 1,592 and 160 in the same tests. That’s about 10 percent for Broadwell-E in the multi-threaded portion, but interestingly the Haswell-E CPU scored a little higher in Cinebench’s single-threaded test.

Silicon Lottery was able to squeeze some nice overclocking results out of Broadwell, though not quite as high as Haswell-E.

“Definitely not clocking as well as Haswell-E, but that was to be expected. We're looking at 4.3-4.4GHz to get stable here,” Silicon Lottery said.

At 4.5GHz, he managed to complete a multi-threaded Cinebench run, which returned a score of 2,327.

These aren’t the only Broadwell-E benchmarks on Overclock.net’s forums. User Maintenance Bot pitted a Core i7-6850K against a Core i7-5820K. He didn’t compare singli-threaded Cinebench scores, but in the multi-threaded run, the Broadwell-E part posted a higher result (1,311 versus 1,191)..